In a recent post with the above title, Bill Muehlenberg includes several important quotes as he makes an important point — here he quotes Paul Kengor from the American Spectator:
In a recent article Paul Kengor discusses the battle for marriage and conservatism. What he says about conservatism can pretty much be said about Christianity as well. He writes:
“Conservatism aims to conserve the time-tested values, ideas, and principles that have been sustained over time by previous generations and traditions…. These are values, ideas, and principles – usually with a Judeo-Christian basis – that have endured for good reason and for the best of society, citizens, country, culture, and order. That’s a brief summation that the late Russell Kirk, probably conservatism’s preeminent philosophical spokesman, would endorse.”
Speaking more on homosexual marriage, he writes:
“Gay marriage, merely by its total newness alone, fails that rudimentary definition. Gay marriage has never been done before. One would never expect a conservative to rush into something as utterly unprecedented – and that directly repudiates the laws of nature and nature’s God – as this completely novel concept called ‘gay marriage.’ Same-sex marriage not only revolutionizes marriage but also human nature generally and family specifically, the latter of which conservatives have always understood as the fundamental building block of civilization.
One would expect a progressive to support redefining marriage, because for progressives, everything is always in a state of never-ending, always-evolving flux. Progressives have no trouble rendering unto themselves the ability to redefine human life itself. Redefining marriage is small potatoes. A progressive can wake up tomorrow and conjure up a new ‘right’ over a grande skim latte at Starbucks. For secular progressives especially, there is no absolute, set standard for things like marriage or, really, even for right or wrong. They are relativists who don’t subscribe to established absolutes. Redefine marriage? Sure, says the progressive. Redefine family, parenthood, motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, gender? Sure, says the progressive.
For conservatives, however, this is unthinkable. Indeed, a conservative cannot even “conserve” when it comes to gay marriage, because gay marriage is an untried idea unimaginable by any people until only very recent days.
To be sure, conservatives, especially those whose conservatism springs from religious underpinnings, should recognize and respect the inherent human dignity of all gay people – being fellow human beings made in the image of God – and should not mistreat them. But those conservatives cannot, in turn, blatantly violate (if not blaspheme) the teachings of their faith and their God on the sanctity of male-female matrimony.”
Read Muehlenberg’s entire article here.
Read Kengor’s entire article here.
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